Processed through both Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex, this image renders the bokeh a little more subtly than in the other images in this series. This one looks different to me every time I look at it.

Sometimes the image presents itself as four trees dissolving into a bokeh-filled sky, their trunks barely holding their shape against the light behind them. Other times it reads more like a misty morning — small funnel clouds touching down somewhere in the distance, and closer to the ground, half-formed and already drifting apart.

A 1969 lens has no opinion about what it’s rendering. It only knows how to let go of everything outside one plane, and this morning, being pulled forward on Judie’s leash, that was enough.

A photograph like this isn’t taken as much as it is processed — knowing how to let a fifty-year-old lens do exactly what it was never meant to do, bringing it fully to life in the software, and then looking back to find two trees, standing on two sides of the same dissolving light.

back to B&W –